28 February 2006 9:00 AM

Peter Hitchens' biog

Peter Hitchens is proud of his enemies. Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams has called for him to be "decommissioned". The Prime Minister once told him to "sit down and stop being bad" for daring to ask him a difficult question. Andrew Marr once described his book "The Abolition of Britain" as "the most sustained, internally logical and powerful attack on Tony Blair and all his works". Recently he was refused an interview by the new Tory leader David Cameron - a rebuff Hitchens took as a compliment.

A former Marxist and Labour Party member, Hitchens says that he understands his opponents from the inside, as he knows what they say to each other in private. He also got to know the Labour Party at close quarters during many years as a Labour Correspondent, reporting on the industrial chaos of the late seventies and early eighties, as well as on the left-wing revolution which convulsed the Labour Party in those years - much of which, in his view, has not been reversed. He dismisses as absurd the belief that New Labour is now a 'Right-Wing' party. Nationalisation, he says, hasn't mattered for years. The Left's new agenda is to revolutionise the schools, weaken the married family and take power in the media. It has adopted political correctness as one of the most effective ways of destroying conservative thought and morals. The Tory Party, in his view, has never grasped this and has in many cases actively supported New Labour's programme. In other areas, such as the destruction of grammar schools, it has failed to oppose it, which has amounted to the same thing.

Hitchens briefly joined the Tories after the resignation of John Major as leader - and at one stage put himself forward as candidate for the Kensington and Chelsea seat. He did not expect to get the nomination, but wanted to warn the local Tories that Michael Portillo was in fact a member of the liberal elite. They ignored him, and selected Portillo. But Hitchens did not abandon the Tories for some years, only deciding that they were, as he now says, "useless" in October 2003 - since when he has been urging conservatives to boycott the Tories, so as to bring about their collapse and make way for an effective pro-British movement, "neither bigoted, nor politically correct".

Hitchens has been a Fleet Street journalist for more than 25 years. He worked for many years for the 'Daily Express', but left it after it was taken over by Richard Desmond, a publisher of 'adult magazines.' He worked at Westminster for some years as a political reporter, and then, as a diplomatic and defence specialist, covered the final stages of the Cold War, attending the Gorbachev-Reagan summits and watching Communism collapse, in Poland, East Germany, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Romania. He lived in Moscow from June 1990 to October 1992, and was present for the final hours of Communism. He was in Moscow on the day of the failed putsch against Gorbachev in August 1991, waking one morning to see tanks rolling along the street where he lived. He went on to spend two years as a correspondent in Washington, travelling to 46 of the 50 United States, Canada, Mexico, Cuba and Haiti. While there, he witnessed two executions and harassed Gerry Adams during the Sinn Fein leader's propaganda tours of the US.

He has reported from most parts of the world - Japan, China, Korea, Australia, South Africa, Israel, Egypt, Jordan, Turkey and most of the countries of Europe from Ireland to the Urals. He has visited Iraq twice since the invasion. He says his worst experience was in Somalia, where he experienced total anarchy for the first time, and could not travel without hiring armed bodyguards who were not much less dangerous than the armed gangs from which they were protecting him. He also saw the arrival of the US marines on the beaches outside Mogadishu, another ill-fated attempt to bring peace and democracy by force of arms. But he also reports from his own country - on cultural tensions in Burnley, Bradford and Oldham, on ballot-rigging in Birmingham, on social decay in South Wales. He has made a detailed study of the crime problem and the changes that have swept through the police force - publishing a book "The Abolition of Liberty". He has attacked the use of drugs to control the behaviour of children, and challenged the existence of the supposed disorder ADHD. He has argued that parents who want single jabs instead of the MMR should be given them on the NHS, and has challenged the Prime Minister and Gordon Brown to say openly if their own young sons have been given the MMR they urge on others. He has opposed the introduction of identity cards and attacked what he sees as the government's assault on ancient English liberties.

He broadcasts as often as he can, which is not as often as he would like because - in his view - the BBC is institutionally biased against conservative opinions. He has appeared on BBC Radio 4's 'Any Questions' and BBC TV's 'Question Time'. Recently he made a programme for Channel Four "Stealing our Liberties". He has also written and presented a critical programme about Nelson Mandela for the same channel, and a documentary on Britain's relations with the EU "This Sceptic Isle" in which he called for British withdrawal, which was shown on BBC FOUR TV.